Thus they speculated; the German venturing no opinion, but smoking the only obtainable substitute for tobacco in stolid silence. Indeed, when hard pressed by his companions, he admitted that he had never had any opinion. ‘Vat is ze goot ov obinions?’ he demanded. ‘Man is no petter vor zem, and it is zo much vasted lapour of prain. I do not know how to tink. Zomedimes I have ask my froints vat it is like, tinking. Zey gannot tell me. Zey tink zey tink, put zey to not tink.’ CHAPTER IV. ‘ALL’S CHEERLESS, DARK, AND DEADLY.’ The stranger, having had their exact circumstances laid before him, took the gloomiest view of the position. The first deep fall of snow had occurred a week after the guide’s departure. If he had not ere that time regained a track, with landmarks familiar to his eye, all hope of his having been able to reach the fort was as foolish as it was vain. ‘For myself,’ said the stranger, ‘I give him up.’ This man, who was henceforth known among them as Matchi, a contraction of the sobriquet bestowed on him by the Indians, fell into his place in that small circle easily enough. They neither liked him nor trusted him. But he had plenty to say for himself, and had a certain originality of thought and language that went some little way towards dispelling the deep gloom that surrounded them. In their wretched position, any one who could bring an element of novelty into their life was welcome. The desperation of his character suited their desperate circumstances. In a civilised country they would have shut their doors in his face. But here, with Death peering in at their threshold, this wild spirit helped them to sustain the horrors of suspense, the dreary foreboding of a fatal end. But there was one charm in his presence which all felt, even the phlegmatic German. With Lucius Davoren’s violin in his hand, he could beguile them into brief forgetfulness of that grisly spectre watching at the door. That passionate music opened the gates of dreamland. Matchi’s _répertoire_ seemed inexhaustible: but everything he played, even melodies the world knows by heart, bore the stamp of his own genius. Whatever subject of Corelli, or Viotti, or Mozart, or Haydn, formed the groundwork of his theme, the improvisatore sported with the air at pleasure, and interwove his own wild fancies with the original fabric. Much that he played was obviously his own composition, improvised as the bow moved over the strings; wild strains which interpreted the gloom of their surroundings; dismal threnodies in which one heard the soughing of the wind among the snow-laden pine-branches; the howling of wolves at sunrise.